There are a wide range of conventional approaches to cancer and precancerous detection, diagnosis, monitoring, and prognosis. Techniques involving tissue analysis generally utilize tissue sections that are stained or otherwise labeled to increase the contrast of effected areas. Preparing the sections for analysis usually requires time consuming processing including the application stain or other labeling techniques that obscure some aspects of the sample. At present, there are not effective cancer detection and diagnostic techniques available that utilize fresh or frozen tissue sections without prior processing, such as staining or other labeling techniques. This delays and complicates the detection and diagnostic process and makes the process more expensive while also limiting the pathology lab from processing more samples and generating more revenue.
The current pathology practice using conventional light microscopy has several critical limitations, including a) time consuming and costly multiple step tissue processing is required to prepare the sample; b) the lateral resolution is about 0.5 mm or worse and no axial information of the specimen is revealed; and c) the diagnosis based mainly on the manual expert examination of the tissue architectural and morphological changes is subjective and suffers from inter- and intra-observer variations. The PSCP system addresses all the above limitations while achieving a cost effective and objective means of higher accuracy for rapid cancer diagnosis and prognosis.
The issue of overtreatment of prostate cancer has received wide public attention demonstrating a need for better prognostication at time of diagnosis. This challenge results partially from the limited sampling of the cancer and therefore limited routine microscopic clues on the diagnostic needle biopsy. Evolving efforts are being made to determine a gene based score to address this need. With the state-of-the-art risk scoring based on co-registered structural and molecular signatures, PSCP offers better prognosis for determination of need for therapy. Identifying and treating only those cancers which will become clinically significant will considerably reduce the treatment costs and the economic burden of cancer.
There is, therefore, a continuing need for improved cancer and precancerous detection, diagnosis, monitoring, and prognosis techniques. More specifically, there is a continuing need for cancer diagnostic techniques that utilize fresh or frozen tissue sections without requiring time consuming prior staining or other labeling techniques prior to analysis of the tissue sections.